Identifying Stakeholders
Once we know who is in the community, then we can focus on identifying who our key stakeholders and collaborators are. Different projects may require us to ask different questions to identify these stakeholders. For example, if you’re designing a small local green space, you’ll want to focus on who uses the space and who will be most impacted. However, in a neighborhood-wide plan, everybody who lives and passes through the area will be impacted.
It’s important to be specific and explicit when you're identifying stakeholders. You don’t just want to say that your target audience is “the community,” you want to be specific about which social, demographic, and/.or cultural groups are most important to engage. When you're setting priorities for who to engage, you might choose to focus on the primary users, the people most affected, and/or the group who've been previously marginalized from the engagement process.
These key stakeholders and collaborators are not always the most obvious or accessible groups. As you did in the process of understanding the community, in the identification of stakeholders it is also important to focus on the most excluded or vulnerable groups.
Stakeholder Goals
The goal of this section is for you and the partner to have shared and specific engagement expectations. Ideally, you will set measurable goals for who you’ll engage and how engagement will influence the design. Setting these goals will help you measure the success of your outreach and these goals can be a useful starting point for creating actionable steps.
After identifying stakeholders with the partner, you should be able to answer the following questions:
Who (be specific) is your primary audience for engagement?
Why is it important to engage them?
How will you measure their participation and impact on the design?
Conversations
The easiest way to start building a list of stakeholders is to talk with your community partner. Just a few questions can help you begin this discussion:
Questions
Who will use this space?
Who already uses this space?
Who will be most impacted, both positively and negatively?
What perspectives do we need to know?
What perspectives are we missing?
Who’s permission may be needed in order to implement this design?
How can we connect with each of these groups?
What events do they attend?
What organizations are they a part of?
Do we have connections within these organizations or groups?
Facilitated Activities
When you have more time with the partner, visualizing stakeholders is a useful tool to facilitate conversations about who you should engage. Mapping allows you to visualize the relationships and roles of community members and local leaders. It can spark discussion on who’s missing and clarify engagement priorities. However, there’s a range of approaches to stakeholder mapping and the technique you choose should align with your goals for the activity. Below is a list of different stakeholder visualization activities accompanied by digital templates with detailed instructions.
Stakeholder Relationship Mapping
This activity is primarily focused on identifying the relationships between stakeholders, whether they be in collaboration, in tension, or have an opportunity for partnership. This activity also allows you to determine your own system for grouping stakeholders so you can customize the categories based on what is most relevant to your project.
Stakeholder Target Mapping
This activity is focused on prioritizing the stakeholders in a project. It allows you to discuss your values for engagement by visualizing who the most important groups to engage are.
RACI Matrix
You can use this matrix to set explicit goals about who you want to engage, why they need to be engaged, and when you will engage them. In this activity, participants are assigned to be either responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed on each piece of the project process.
SWOT Analysis
In this analysis, characteristics of the neighborhood are categorized as either a strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat. You can use this tool to expand your network of stakeholders by considering who in the neighborhood might represent each category and how you can connect with them. This prompts you and the partners to include a broader range of groups, rather than just those who align with our values or are easy to work with.
Stakeholder Hopes & Fears
In this activity, you and the partner take the perspective of key stakeholder groups and identify their hopes and fears as it relates to the design and development of the space. By mapping the connections between these hopes and fears, you can see new opportunities for collaboration and also acknowledge areas of disagreement.
Continuum of Engagement Matrix
You can use this activity to discuss how you want to engage each stakeholder group. By visualizing the varying amounts of power and levels of engagement of each stakeholder you can be more intentional about planning outreach and engagement.
Asking “Who’s Missing?”
Even when we are intentional and critical in our process of identifying stakeholders, we or our partners may still forget certain groups. This is why it is crucial to always ask “who’s missing?” Not only should you be thinking about this question in every project, but you should be asking it at nearly every step within a project. As you're scoping, making an engagement plan, doing outreach, and hosting events, you should always be thinking about you might be missing, why they're missing, and how you can bring them into the process.
In order to facilitate this discussion, you could refer back to the maps you used to learn more about the neighborhood statistics. The data in these maps can serve as concrete evidence about who or what is in a neighborhood. Referencing factual summaries of neighborhood demographics and assets makes it easier to ask and answer the question of “Who are we missing?” Consider pulling up one of the ArcGIS maps (linked below) with your partner as a discussion prompt.
Data & MapsAdditionally, you can use some of these facilitated activities to prompt your community team to think about who might have been left out. For example, the SWOT analysis can help you identify who in the community you might be hesitating to connect with and mapping Stakeholder Hopes & Fears can help you consider the perspectives of conflicting groups.
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